Virginia Olive Hoge is an artist and writer living in Pasadena, California. She was first introduced to Topix when a serious of hostile threads and polls were built on the Pasadena Topix forums which attacked her and her liberal blog. The Topix threads built on Topix for Virginia/Ginny/Olive, now number in the hundreds. She has become one of the most trolled posters ever on Topix, stalked the entire time and is well-known there. A fighter, she has fought back on Topix, defending herself and others there.
She jumped onto the National Topix forums to understand better what was going on around the entire Country and beyond, and became familiar with the raw, brutal, coarse, dramatic, violent, and mythical world that is Topix.com.
Welcome to the outer-limits of free speech, the Wild, Wild West of Citizen Journalism. She was on Topix for four years.
What a odyssey it was.

Chris Tolles lashes out at journalists and real news sites.

Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it. - Charles Dickens

I have wondered so many times, why the nation's journalists have sat back, and let Chris Tolles trash them, for years.

Its a puzzle...

The vast harm wrecked by Topix and Tolles, his covert dealings with the NSA sharing millions of his user's personal data with them, the human rights abuses and number of live's destroyed that can directly be attributed to this one man, are so many! Its hard to fathom, but add to this, his constant trashing of journalists and newspapers.

"Freed from having to be a journalist"

Tolles has made his scorn for journalists known and for years.

Here, he went onto his Topix blog to compare Google Chrome analysis and took the opportunity, as is his wont, to lash out at journalism and real news sites.

Tolles declares Lyons was "Freed from having to be a "journalist"... making his point *better* than if he had to actually use the tone and tenor of a "real" news site"

Here is Lyon's commentary Chris Tolles appreciates so much:

Dan Lyons:"What the fuck is going on inside Google? How much more out of control and undisciplined can this place get? How many new goddamn operating systems are they going to create? They've already got Android, and nobody wants it. Now they're going to make yet another operating system, this time out of a browser that nobody wants. What's next? A Gmail-based operating system? A YouTube-based operating system? Honestly, Google, is there anyone in charge over there? Is there anyone who knows how to criticize anything in that fucked up little Montessori preschool of yours? I mean I guess it's nice that you all get to spend 20 percent of your time dreaming up useless shit, and I guess you have to use the Montessori method and tell everyone that whatever little piece of shit they've created is just so wonderful and perfect and beautiful -- but really, as I've told Eric before, that doesn't mean you have to release everything these bozos dream up. There's a word for this. It's called "no." Have you heard of it?"

WTF? Chris Tolles likes this? "Is there anyone who knows how to criticize anything in that fucked up little Montessori preschool of yours?"

He clearly likes it better when someone writes exactly like an angry troll:

Dan Lyons:"You also may not have noticed, but nobody uses Chrome. I mean think about it. Do you know anyone who uses Chrome? Really? And you know why nobody uses Chrome? Because Chrome is shit. Just utter, utter shit. I mean they've got all these big brains at Google and you'd think they could make a decent fucking browser. Jesus, the freetards at Mozilla can do it. But not Google. Nope. They gave it their big best effort and what did they come up with? Chrome. It's a joke. I mean, literally, we laugh about it, except when Eric is around. But as soon as he leaves the room we all go "Chrome!" and just burst out laughing."

Chris Tolles: "Seriously. It's the best thing I've read about the whole project."

NYT Journos "trapped in the leaden prison of reporting"

Something else interesting about this article, is where Tolles flatters TechCrunch and MG Siegler, while bashing the New York Times:

Chris Tolles: "Similarly, MG's use of the Atomic friggin' bomb on his TechCrunch Post really made the point a lot better about the importance of this than the reporting from a really really good NY Times reporter, Miguel Helft. The NY Times guys cracked the story, and drove those guys at Google to put out their blog post ahead of schedule -- brilliant.

But then they're trapped by the leaden prison of reporting "all the news fit to print".

The New York Times reporters are "trapped in their leaden prison"of reporting News, is he joking here?

Nope.

The local watering hole

And as I have written, TechCrunch and Topix are very tight, to the point TechCrunch refused to post my comments to the MG Siegler flattering TechCrunch article, which calls Topix - Topix! - a "local watering hole":

Chris Tolles apparently, prefers it this way: Troll-like "journalism" as opposed to the "leaden prison" of real reporting, conveniently censored opinion and local watering holes out of the days of the Tyrannosaurs Rex!

Tolles is forever lashing out at journalists on Twitter and elsewhere, he got all exicited by a fight between Salon and Wired he had witnessed, and gleefully wrote:

*tolles Chris Tolles Journalists fighting with each other is good for the rest of us. Lack of resolution is a positive outcome, if issues are real :)8 hours ago

*tolles Chris Tolles @Chanders this is a good thing - journalists need to learn how to fight and realize that they are driving an agenda, just like everyone else

"There is no referee in the big game"

*tolles Chris Tolles @jeffjarvis no. There should be multiple points of view, spin and subjectivity. There is no referee in the big game.

*tolles Chris Tolles Great things going on with wired/salon fight. The idea that "journalism" is somehow a singular truth is finally under fire.

*tolles Chris Tolles if you want to take on the Church Militant side of Journalism you need to have some weapons in your rhetorical arsenal

Chris Tolles' Tribe

He does not care in the slightest for ethics, never has. He Tweets about his dream "New Tribe" (he has called the Silicon Valley his Tribe). Many times over the years he rants on about his dream ethic-less tribe:

"We need to build a new tribe. Not one with the ethics of newspaper journos"

*tolles Chris Tolles comes down to the idea that the web is all of us on it. We need to build a new tribe. Not one with the ethics of newspaper journos

"You make the assumption being a journalist gives you a special role"

Chris Tolles: "Typical. You make the assumption that being a journalist gives you a special role with regard to your opinion vs those of the people."

"Journalism isn't a profession, its a religion"

Chris Tolles: "Journalism isn't a profession, it's a religion."

How come the media has protected and covered-up for Topix?

Tolles cannot stand journalism... so...

So how come the Media has been protecting Topix so very well???

They sure have been awfully nice to him, protecting his site to a ridiculous degree, and all the while, he trashes them all the time.

Topix receives almost no press besides from myself, and I have paid a very high price for this. I and my supporters have suffered copious defamation on Topix, criminal threats all the time, because Tolles is clearly so threatened by my Open Salon posts. He has had his vicious corporate, empowered trolls, lash out at us, while not once, addressing a single issue I have raised here on Open Salon, not once either denying or affirming one thing I have written.

When Chris Tolles speaks about there not being a singular truth, I can vouch for the fact that truth is not something he is interested in in the slightest.

Topix is all-too-often about the promotion and support of hatred, hostility and violence, often in service to issues, and the diminishment of journalism and print media. Tolles has openly spoken about his desire to replace journalism.